New campaign aims to keep students Young and Proud

Windsor youth group Young and Proud are taking their anti-bullying campaign to another level with support from the United Way GenNext Youth Leadership Grant.

Young and Proud is a support group developed by the AIDS Committee of Windsor, a registered charity, and is geared toward creating an open forum of discussion about various topics including relationships, coming out, safe sex and HIV/AIDS. The program received $2,500 on Aug. 30 to help the youth group identify an issue they found relevant to them and their peers. The funding will provide the group with a way to address those issues in a creative and innovative way.

Colm Holmes, coordinator of Young and Proud, said the grant will be funding an anti- homophobic, anti-transphobic and anti-bullying campaign aimed at youth across Windsor and Essex County and to service providers who work with the youth.

“The project is still in the planning stage and we (have) yet to do a presentation to a school or agency. The youth are very excited to start this project and be involved in something like this working towards combating bullying in schools and youth services,” said Holmes.

“The reason it is important to them is because they have experienced bullying and isolation. They know the feeling of being unsafe and hope to combat that with the awareness campaign in order for other individuals like themselves to not experience the same issues.”

Danielle Michie, 16, a student at Walkerville Collegiate Institute has been a member for approximately five months and said she found out about the group through a friend.

“Young and Proud is like a really great place for people to go, it’s a really accepting environment and so what we thought we would do with it was we would try to spread that feeling and that idea to other community groups,” said Michie.

“It’s a really great place, because everybody is accepted, everybody is welcome and there’s no questions asked and that’s just a great environment to have for teenagers because you don’t get that in high school.”

The group is comprised of 73 members, has an active group of 45 people and has an average of 14 to 20 individuals attending weekly meetings.

“We started talking about it but we haven’t started planning things quite yet. We have an idea of what we’re going to do. It’s just a matter of getting people together to start working on that. It should be any week now I’m assuming,” said Michie.

The funding will be used to pay for software, equipment and advertising for the campaign.

According to the AIDS Committee of Windsor HIV continues to be an issue in the community. People between the ages of 15 and 29 account for 27 per cent of infections.

Program coordinator for GenNext Windsor-Essex County Anjana Jacob said the Youth Leadership Grant Program was established earlier this year to cultivate the next generation of leaders ages 14 to 25.

Young and Proud was one of two groups awarded funding. The other was Youth & Family Resource Network’s Voices of Youth in Community program.

“We ask them to identify the issue that was important to them, something that they saw as a concern for other people their age, so we left it to them to identify the issue they could address,” said Jacob.

“We we’re more concerned with how they went about addressing the issue and allowing them to develop their leadership skills that way. So what were they were going to propose as a way to address this issue, how are they going to go about unveiling their project throughout the year. We’re more concerned with that then the issue that they were addressing.”

GenNext has approximately 32 committee members and had raised money for the grant program by participating in bowling fundraisers and other United Way initiatives. Jacob said they hope to continue the program on an annual basis.